I'm a writer, publishing both as SJ Rozan and, with Carlos Dews, as Sam Cabot. (I'm Sam, he's Cabot.) Here you can find links to my almost-daily blog posts, including the Saturday haiku I've been doing for years. BUT the blog itself has moved to my website. If you go on over there you can subscribe and you'll never miss a post. (Miss a post! A scary thought!) Also, I'll be teaching a writing workshop in Italy this summer -- come join us!

I had to laugh when I read my sister's strategy for coping with clutter, in Saturday's comments.

"I have been de-cluttering for a while and have a pretty good system- I box up the things I don't want to see anymore and bring them to the storage building we have here on the farm where I store them, never to be seen again until I bring another box of stuff to store, never to be seen again until...so on and so on until the building is full when I plan to set it on fire!"

My first reaction is, YOU HAVE A FARM WITH STORAGE BUILDINGS!!! But then I had to admit that in point of unassailable fact I'd been using a variant of that strategy myself. I had a rented room in a storage facility seven blocks from here, where I kept the family papers I'd ended up with after our parents died, and lots of books, and some furniture, and all that STUFF that has no other category (a carved and painted baseball bat, souvenir of Mexico, circa 1960...). And I never went over there either, except to shove more stuff in.

But this is NYC. Last summer we all got notices: everything has to be moved out, your contract is cancelled, the building's being renovated for condos!

And the need to deal with that STUFF is what sparked my attitude adjustment on the need for stuff. And that's what expanded into a re-assessment on the need for non-tangible, but just as annoying, stuff.